A Mountain Retreat in Colorado Opens the Door Wide to Progressive Possibilities

Architecture has furnished English with many terms that have become reassuring metaphors for stability—words like foundation, keystone, cornerstone and structure. But the Rocky Mountain vacation house that New Mexico architect Antoine Predock designed for Miriam Horn, a writer, and her husband, Charles Sabel, a professor, was predicated on instability. This is the house that uncertainty built.

When the New Yorkers decided to build on their 15 acres in a remote mountain valley of Colorado, there was something in it for everyone, including their daughter, Francesca Sarah, now eight. Before becoming a New York cultural critic and author, Horn had worked for the U.S. Forest Service in Colorado, and she had maintained an abiding affinity for the West despite her New York address. Sabel, who teaches regulatory policy at Columbia Law School, specializes in disequilibrium theory. A house in a Colorado forest with a river running through it represented a return to Colorado for Horn. For Sabel, the design process itself offered a field test for his theories about building on what he calls “a continuous mutual disruption.” He explains, “What you do determines what I do, and vice versa. By the end of our collaboration, neither of us could have anticipated the result.”

Predock—known for designing buildings that take their cues from nature big and small, from stars and mountains to surrounding trees—was enticed by the idea of building a question mark: Why, after all, design a house when you already know from the beginning just what it will be?

“The goal was not to start with a fixed idea of what we wanted but to start a process that would produce surprises,” says Sabel. “Interesting design happens when unexpected and random occurrences push architects to overcome the limits of their habits.”

“The house may be like a sculpture, but it also becomes part of the way we perceive things.”

Predock was the first to throw a curve into the works. At the initial design session in his Albuquerque, New Mexico, office, Predock presented a site model studded with wood dowels representing a crescent of ponderosa pines curving around a jostled stack of blocks representing the organization of the three-bedroom house. As he concluded the presentation, he literally threw in the surprise. “Trees have a life span, and I thought about what would happen if the trees fell down,” says Predock. “Just the gesture of dropping a clutch of dowels on the model felt, and looked, right.” He was seriously proposing logs landing on the house.

From his student days as a painter, when he was influenced by Abstract Expressionists, Predock knew that making a mark on canvas constituted a special event. “Inside all of us, we have that innocent mark, the gesture of painting, and I honor the idea of that gesture even off the canvas,” he says. For him the scatter of logs and blocks represented gesture. It was also a sophisticated transformation of the sentimental log cabin.

“Antoine was holding something behind his back in his right hand,” recalls Horn, “and then he threw these sticks on the model in an uncontrolled way that couldn’t produce a predictable geometry. It was a dramatic moment—and sheer fun—as though he was making some Jackson Pollock effect. Then there was some rearranging.

“We could have done a safe house,” she continues. “A million things could have gone wrong. It was a scary thing to do.”

Predock often monumentalizes his buildings to scale them to the larger landscape, but the accidentalism of the gesture, says Sabel, “minimized the chance of monumentality and helped preserve the intimacy of our site. Of course, our budget helped that, too.”

Other surprises that came later in the process included the steel-mesh infill of the stair and balcony railings and the nearly double-height pier that supports the logs at their point of intersection inside the house.

“The process introduced ricochets into the design, and Antoine was willing to put the design at risk by absorbing them,” says Sabel. “His ability to handle these perturbations made me respect Antoine all the more.”

Predock himself introduced other perturbations. “Galvalume?” asks Sabel. “Galvanized aluminum was a big surprise for us. We anticipated something with associations of domesticity, but actually it’s a material that’s seen nearby on vernacular buildings like barns.” The couple accepted the metal cladding.

Now as you drive across a bridge over the river and approach the house on a long switchback, glimpses of the house shimmer through the woods. In the winter, the luminous metal takes to the snow like a duck to water, with light reflecting off the snow onto the metal and back. At the last turn toward the house, the metal siding evokes the most prominent feature of the valley, the glaciated walls of a cliff whose face is composed of a polished, silvery-gray granite.

Inside, each bedroom is situated on a different level, with overlooks into adjacent spaces that provide the illusion of a house much larger than its 2,200 square feet. “Moving through it is like a journey,” says Horn, “up and down, as though hiking.”

They kept the interior simple, by choice and necessity. “I wanted an antidote to our house in New York,” she says, “something low maintenance that was empty and quiet and serene and open to the world outside. Besides, by the time we finished, we were broke. We bought nearly everything off craigslist.”

The spare simplicity becomes a sculpturally articulate house of fine bones and crisp volumes. The couple purposely hang nothing on the walls. “The windows are amazing and become the focus of our gaze,” says Horn.

Sabel adds, “The house may be like a sculpture, but it also becomes part of the way we perceive things, like an instrument for seeing that makes you notice the surroundings.”

“My favorite part is the top bunk by the window up there in my room,” says Francesca Sarah, “because I can wake up from a bad dream and see the wilderness—the forest, the mountains and the deer and elk and foxes and turkeys, where they pass by. I give names to the trees.”

Then there’s the happy perturbation of a terrace off her bedroom where Francesca Sarah—“I’m obsessed with Shakespeare”—plays Romeo to her audience, the rampant chipmunks and, of course, her parents, sitting on a fallen log.